(in which it is suggested that Reagan was divinely appointed) with, as several reviews have noted, an obsessively researched and exuberantly narrated tome that suggests otherwise. If one has appointed oneself as the chief storyteller of an era, it must be painful to watch a young upstart win accolades for killing your happily-ever-after ending It is, however, hard to accept Shirley's goal in blindsiding Perlstein as merely philosophical it's surely personal, as well. In Perlstein's telling, Reagan is less the noble revolutionary than the canny beneficiary of a clueless political establishment and a nation in longing for a denialist reinventor of its recent history. The narrative, of course, is that of Reagan as noble revolutionary, a narrative threatened by the Perlstein book, which sets the right's idol in the context of the tumult of his times, noting his role as an apologist for Watergate and reviser of the outcome of the Vietnam War as a win for America. In the case of smearing Perlstein, that philosophical goal would appear to be for control of the Reagan narrative that Shirley himself has sought to shape in his two biographies. "It's all designed to advance some type of philosophical goal." "Everything we do is designed to move numbers, shape opinion, advance legislation, put people on book bestseller lists, stop legislation, whatever," says Shirley, sitting next to Banister in the firm's conference room. Not hampered by such bounds of politeness, I can here assert that Shirley is the purveyor of the fruits of the most odious and untruthful of right-wing hacks.īefore we examine his client list, let's examine what Craig Shirley does in his day job at his public relations firm, Shirley & Banister, and why he says he does it, here from an interview with the Washington Post's Krissah Thompson: In her critique of the Times article on Shirley's smear, Sullivan politely notes that that Shirley is of an "opposing political orientation" to that of Perlstein.
man, Shirley knew that all he had to do was to make the charge and demand that the all-too-compliant mainstream media respond with its typical false-equivalency approach to all tensions between left and right, and it could go viral. As plagiarism goes, crediting the source is hardly the standard method, but, as a p.r. His plagiarism charge is based on instances in which Perlstein paraphrased and credited Shirley's work. The incendiary charge against Perlstein, author of Invisible Bridge, the much-heralded book about the years leading up to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, was that of plagiarism, made by Craig Shirley, who would doubtless prefer to be credited as the author of his Reagan biographies, Rendezvous With Destiny and Reagan's Revolution, than for the public relations smear work by which he actually earns his living. Readers frequently complain to me about this he said, she said false equivalency - and for good reason. It's as if The Times is saying: Here's an accusation here's a denial and, heck, we don't really know. So says the paper's public editor, Margaret Sullivan: In a recent article about attacks on the character of historian Rick Perlstein, the New York Times dropped the ball of responsible journalism by giving equal weight to the claims of the attacker and the defense mounted by the attacked.
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